Jonathan Franzen - How He Came to Be Somewhere - An Interview and Three Early Stories

Stephen’s cousin Peter, on the other hand, when he’d been having unprotected sex with his Pilates instructor, Rebecca, frequently enough (and then some) to make her pregnant, went straight to his wife, Deanna, with whom he already had two children, and said that although he was committed to their marriage he was also in love with Rebecca, and he wanted to be involved with raising their child, and perhaps everyone could just learn to get along? Peter’s plan was financially realistic — he was a radiation oncologist with a busy uptown practice — and he felt that if Deanna was realistic herself she could hardly say no. Peter was a nice, late-blooming Midwestern boy who had married his plain and rather clingy college girlfriend and let her go to work at a bank to support him in med school. He could see now that a successful Manhattan oncologist could do a lot better, spouse-wise, than a sour, fussy, pinch-faced mom with large thighs, and that to stay with her would be like continuing to pay eighties-level interest rates while the rest of the world refinanced its mortgages — there was no earthly reason for it, basically — but, at the same time, he recognized that he owed a lot to Deanna, and he loved his kids, and one of the many excellent things about Rebecca was how comfortable she was with the idea of French-style family arrangements. So it wasn’t like there were any jerks in the picture here. Everyone was doing his or her best to be nice and responsible while remaining, of course (as Peter stressed in his presentation to Deanna), realistic . It was only after Deanna had hired a capable lawyer and won full custody of the kids and a financially eviscerating divorce settlement that Peter realized how wrong he’d been, from the very beginning, about Deanna — she’d never really been nice at all! she was homely and mean! — and how lucky he was to have Rebecca, who was not just young and shapely but also (as witness her willingness to share Peter with Deanna) genuinely menschy, although, as he sometimes admitted to himself in the shower, or in bed at three in the morning, when his second Martini was wearing off, or when he happened to think of Deanna in her bloated new house up in Harrison, with her atrocious S.U.V., and caught himself mentally addressing her in terms like “Old Pig Eyes,” niceness was a relative term and Deanna probably viewed the matter somewhat differently.

Or, as Peter’s friend Antonia liked to tell visitors to the high-floor parkside unit on Central Park West that she’d bought with the proceeds of her own divorce settlement, there came a point in every failing marriage when you found yourself in a room with a waxwork hologram of yourself: when you saw, through your spouse’s demented eyes, the monster he projected in your place, a monster who resembled you superficially (though it was probably somewhat fatter and more wrinkly than you really were, just as his youthful idealization of you had probably been firmer and sexier than you’d really been back then) but was in every other respect a fantastic and wholly unfamiliar creature. Antonia made all her visitors remove their shoes at the door to her place on the Park and never let more than one friend at a time come to see her; even her daughters had to visit one at a time, without bringing overnight guests or wearing shoes inside. These were just some little house rules that Antonia allowed herself to enforce after twenty-plus years of motherhood and hellish corporate-wifedom in Palo Alto. The decisive moment in her own marriage had come in her Palo Alto kitchen, after she made an unloving remark to her husband. The remark was no different from a thousand other unloving remarks she’d made in the previous ten years; but this time the husband, who was a small and mild and nose-scrunchingly nervous man with a face familiar to viewers of “Wall $treet Week,” grabbed her by the throat with his right hand and pressed his thumb into her windpipe. With his left hand, he pinned her wrists against her chest. He brought his face very close to hers, which was rapidly turning purple, and pleaded with her: “ Why are you doing this to me ?” To which Antonia could only say, “Kegh. Ecck!” And so the husband screamed directly in her face, “Why are you doing this to me! Would you please stop doing this to me!” As Antonia later told her visiting, shoeless friends, one by one, this was the moment when, in spite of her growing fear, she had suddenly seen herself as her husband saw her: as a crushingly strong and evil person who had been causing him terrible harm for many years; as the monstrous figure who kept him from attaining every pleasure and every freedom he’d ever wished for, who annihilated his manhood with her cunning and her wit. Nevertheless, she tried to point out the patent absurdity of his plea. “Guaggh — kgheck,” she said. Some time later, when she regained consciousness, she found herself lying on her back on the kitchen floor. The husband was leaning against the utility island, eating a folded-over piece of sandwich-style rye bread. Antonia’s throat was raw and clogged, but she had more of a sense of humor than of self-protection. “I was trying to say,” she said, coughing as she laughed, “who’s strangling who?” The husband’s reply was matter-of-fact: “I wasn’t strangling you.” “Then why,” Antonia said, “is my windpipe practically broken and me lying on the floor?” The husband stated flatly, “I never touched you.” And the curious thing, Antonia told her friends, was that he believed what he was saying. And she saw what he meant, and she believed him, too; because how could he have touched her when she, the real she, wasn’t even in the same room (or, possibly, the same universe) that he was in? Nevertheless, she said, it worried her to see him behaving psychotically. “Honey?” she essayed tenderly, from the floor. At this, the husband reached out and seemed to strangle invisible Antonias in the air all around him, his eyes beseeching Heaven. “What will it take to get rid of you?” he cried. “What do I have to do to make you stop doing this to me?” Oh, the poor little man, Antonia thought; I’ve nearly killed him. “Just give me half the money,” she said, putting her hands on her throat. “Just— haugh, guagg, hack, kkgh! That’s all! Just aaaghkk the money, honey!” She laughed and coughed, and the husband ran from the room ashen-faced, as if he’d seen a fulminating witch, a dead woman speaking, some kind of horror-flick apparition. In later years Antonia never, in her stocking-footed friends’ hearing, spoke of him with anger, always only pity, because, she said, he knew himself so poorly. And her friends, listening to her tell these stories in a voice that grew more cartoonishly little-girlish with each year she spent on Central Park West, felt sorry for the husband, too.

AND THEN THE PERFECT COUPLE, Pam and Paul, who first hooked up in college, co-writing operettas and co-founding a cabaret, went on to amaze their classmates by marrying in Reno six months before they even graduated, and finally, at a combined age of forty-three, set up shop in California as a comedy-writing duo. They were still only twenty-seven when NBC picked up their pilot for a series about suburban teen-agers with funny yesteryear hair styles and funny yesteryear teen difficulties. Every Wednesday night, for the next five seasons, tens of millions of smiling Americans watched the heart icon in the show’s closing credit (“A PAMELA BURGER ♥ PAUL MATHER CREATION”) twinkle once to the sound of a little chime. In joint appearances at their alma mater’s Career Day — Pam resembling a freckly Bartlett pear, Paul a cartoon scallion with well-gelled rootlets — the two of them dispensed encouragement to aspiring young writers. “Work hard, don’t compromise, never settle for the easy deal,” Pam said. “Failing that,” Paul said, “at least make sure the easy deal is for eight figures.” The happy couple, whose three Emmies had the effect of confirming the literary rightness of their relationship, retired from the show in 1998, sold their bungalow in Santa Monica, and bought a thirty-acre spread up in the mountains, because, as they quipped in joint interviews with their old home-town papers in North Carolina and Massachusetts, Paul had become psychologically incapable of remembering whether the “O” in “Michael Ovitz” was long or short and therefore couldn’t appear in public anymore.